A five-year, $1,427,679 grant from the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) will fund a project at Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science that will analyze data on aquatic prey and habitat conditions during the dry season across the freshwater Everglades. The researchers hope this will provide essential insight into one of the most important drivers of wading bird nesting success.
The project, titled “Dry Season Prey Concentrations in the Florida Everglades,” will directly support USACE’s Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), a large-scale effort to restore South Florida’s ecosystem by modifying water management practices.
“This project is incredibly exciting because it allows us to quantify the link between water conditions, fish populations and wading bird nesting across the Everglades,” said Michelle L. Petersen, assistant research professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and one of the project leads. “By identifying when and where prey concentrations occur, we can better understand what drives nesting success and provide information that directly supports restoration efforts in this unique and vital ecosystem.”
Petersen explained that one of the main goals of the project is to understand how wading birds respond to changes in water levels, especially during the dry season when the concentration of prey can affect their nesting success. The health of wading bird populations are important because population declines have been linked to reductions in fish and other aquatic prey, particularly when these prey fail to concentrate in small patches that birds can efficiently exploit.
The project will measure prey concentrations across the Everglades landscape, including Everglades National Park, the Water Conservation Areas, and the C-111 Basin, a series of wide canal that serves to channel flood water away from western Miami-Dade County during the rainy wet season.
The research will help to strengthen predictive models and support USACE’s long-term adaptive management efforts under CERP by linking hydrologic patterns, prey availability and wading bird nesting success.
“We anticipate this project will greatly improve our understanding of the links between hydrology, prey availability, and wading bird nesting, providing crucial insight into how restoration efforts can most effectively achieve the goals of CERP,” said Petersen. “By combining long-term monitoring with innovative analysis, this work marks an important step forward in both the science and management of one of the world’s most iconic wetland ecosystems.”
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